The Essence and Power of Evil

James Hitchcock

The horrendous events of September 11 confront us with a reality even more disturbing
than our apparent vulnerability to terrorist attacks. They require us to reexamine our
entire understanding of the nature of reality.

In the face of unimaginable catastrophe there has been much talk about tragedy, human
suffering, heroism, cowardice, patriotism, and resisting hatred, all of which are true as
far as they go.

But events now confront us with realities so enormous that little can be said, and our
culture's ultimate failure is that it actively works against the ability to understand
such things. As most Westerners view reality, there is no reason why such things should
happen. Thus, it seems that those who perpetrate such acts have simply made certain
mistakes of understanding, reinforced by excessive emotion. Terrorism, we are told,
solves nothing. The terrorists' grievances are understandable, but they have chosen the
wrong methods.

For some people, the whole episode revolves around technical problems--better security
systems, the necessity henceforth to be more vigilant, in ways other peoples simply take
for granted. For others, the solution is retaliation against the terrorists, followed by
diplomatic efforts to "get to the root of the problem." What these have in common is the
assumption that what we face is containable and comprehensible within the categories of
understanding that our culture permits.

People turn to religion at such moments, but even the most devout realize the limits
of the comfort that the faith provides for bereaved people. Christianity offers no
"answer" to the questions, no coherent resolution of all perplexities. Rather, it speaks
of the "mystery of iniquity." The common religious responses are not wrong--comfort for
the bereaved, the promise of resurrection, a righteous desire for justice, love of
enemies. But none of these explain "why." Rather, our faith opens us to the eternal and
cosmic perspective.

This is not only our belief that the dead still live in Christ, which provides comfort
and meaning in a way no purely worldly creed can equal. It means rather that our faith
makes us understand that events of this kind are not merely bizarre anomalies. We are
engaged, as we always have been, in a war against principalities and powers, something we
can forget only because of the numerous comforts our culture provides.

Despite our Puritan heritage, most Americans simply do not believe in evil. They
prefer to believe in "mistakes," "failure to grow," "misguided zeal," "social causes,"
"lack of empathy for others," and similar rationalizations. We apply those ideas
routinely to our own lives; thus, we see the cosmic picture in the same way.

The two common explanations of terrorism are a sense of injustice and religious
fanaticism, and both are real enough.

Predictably, fanaticism will be used to argue that religious belief is a dangerous
thing, the source of many of the world's evils, and there is a point to that claim,
albeit not the one that its proponents make. Precisely because religion does put us in
touch with the deepest wellsprings of existence, it has the greatest potential for both
good and evil. A religionless world, whatever else it might be, would be a spiritually
impoverished world. Religion is indeed a volatile substance, precisely because it is the
realm where good and evil directly meet.

The "problem of evil" is insoluble even for Christians, because finally we do not know
why the all-good God permits evil, although our greatest glory--our freedom--is also the
instrument by which we thwart the divine will.

Since God cannot create evil, Christianity defines evil as nothingness, the absence of
being, as St. Thomas Aquinas calls it. At first, this may seem specious, but the events
of September 11 show quite dramatically that it is so. The essence of the terrorist act
is to reduce being to nothingness. Before our very eyes, some of the most imposing
monuments of our prosperous society are reduced to dust, even as thousands of human
beings cease to exist in this world. The essence of all evil is to make something into
nothing. The climax of the latest terrorist acts was the willful annihilation of the
terrorists' own selves, the ultimate act of allegiance to nothingness.

For motives we find difficult to understand, this urge to annihilate has a powerful
fascination. Thus, if the apparent causes of terrorism were removed, things of this kind
would still occur, because they are rooted in human nature gone awry. Political and
religious grievances provide the rationale for such actions, but such things happen every
day on the personal level.

Religion has to do with ultimate reality. God, St. Thomas tells us, is pure being, the
fullness of existence. But Satan is a fallen angel whose own limitations nurture a
horrifying hatred of all that is good, a hatred of being itself. The power of evil is the
power of a vacuum--a nothingness that sucks everything into itself in order to
destroy.

The events of September 11 also have inevitably brought into focus the various ways in
which our culture teaches people to evade recognition of evil.

Some, predictably, recognize it but see it in the victims. They issue long lists of
conditions that the United States must fulfill before it can even begin to ask for
justice. But in the minds of such people, America is the cause of most of the evil in the
world, so the list will never be complete.

A variant convenient way of avoiding confrontation with evil is the positing of moral
equivalency--the claim that an act of such magnitude must have been provoked by some
equal injustice. Why else would anyone do such a thing?

A leading guru of the New Age movement gave a presentation in which he talked
about--himself. He had, he confessed, discovered violent feelings even within himself.
Fortunately, this gave him the opportunity to take his listeners through a meditation
exercise guaranteed to eradicate those feelings. His claim was intriguing because of its
incorrigible self-centeredness--the guru foreswore all thoughts of vengeance by
pretending that the universe is contained within his own head.

A student leader smiled cheerfully on television as she said, "I'm really proud of the
way this has been a real growth experience for most students," as though the havoc were
worthwhile because of the challenges it offered.

Among some religious believers, evasion took the familiar form of treating evil as a
mere personal inadequacy, to be overcome by sincere effort. Thus, we were solemnly
exhorted to cultivate peaceful attitudes and to "reach out" to others, who would then
reciprocate, without even a clue as to why, realistically, attitudes of peacefulness on
our part will lead to a change of heart by our enemies.

On the eve of World War II the most influential American theologian of the twentieth
century, Reinhold Niebuhr, broke with many of his fellow liberal Protestants because of
their lack of realism, their inability to recognize the menacing evil that then
confronted civilization.

On one level, their failure might have been dismissed as pious sentimentality. But
Niebuhr understood that it made otherwise good people into apologists for evil, so eager
were they to avoid confrontation with it. It was also another manifestation of
self-centeredness--projecting onto others, who live thousands of miles away both
geographically and culturally, our own fondest beliefs.

Crises are a basic test of religion, and our religion passes that test, as shown by
the many people who spontaneously turned to faith during the latest crisis. But some
spokesmen for religion in fact make it irrelevant, implying that being a believer means
dreaming about the world as we would like it to be, the sort of escapism that religion's
critics have always charged it with.

Sentimental people persist in seeing a peaceful world just around the corner, so that
when events like those of September 11 occur, they react like a man convinced that one
more round of tinkering with his backyard invention will at last produce a working
perpetual-motion machine.

The blunt truth is that Christianity teaches us that we will never, short of the end
of time, achieve a world of perfect peace and justice. That does not mean that we are
absolved from working towards it, nor that in certain periods we might seem closer to it
than at others. But the perfect society will never come. That is what Original Sin
means.

Those who deny that religion has anything to do with terrorism miss the point. No
doubt such terrorism is a perversion of the highest teachings of Islam. But all
religions, including Christianity, contain things that are available for such perversion.
Those who kill in the name of religion are seldom merely using it as an excuse. Usually,
they are believers whose sinfulness leads them to turn good into evil.

Perhaps the ultimate evasion is the assumption that the events of September 11 are so
extreme that they manifest an exotic reality that need only concern us in times of
emergency. But to think that is to miss the most basic reality. Deliberate mass murder is
unique only in its magnitude, the events of September 11 unique only in the dramatic way
in which they manifested evil. The somber truth is that actions of this kind go on all
the time.

There was a startling report by a terrorism expert that each year about 30 pilots
deliberately crash their small planes in an attempt to kill themselves and someone they
hate--an ex-spouse, a former employer. "Serial killers," who kill only for their own
gratification, are a recognized category in our society, and every day there are numerous
malicious assaults on essentially innocent people. Such things are not, of course, the
whole story of human nature, but they are a necessary part of it.

The idea of moral equivalency is attractive because it seems to lessen evil--terrorism
occurs only because of injustices done to the terrorists. But believing that requires
believing that every violent act, anywhere at any time, must have understandable motives.
It ignores the reality of irrational hatred, of malice.

It is in recognizing this that religion begins to show its ultimate relevance.
Believing in evil does not automatically dictate any particular course of action in any
particular situation. But it ought to be the first condition for anyone claiming to have
something to say about terrorism.